


Waiting on the World to Change

by LillySunshine



Category: iZombie (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 11:51:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6565027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LillySunshine/pseuds/LillySunshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ravi had suspected Liv was a zombie long before he caught her watching Night of the Living Dead and casually chowing down noodles and Jane Doe’s frontal lobe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting on the World to Change

**Author's Note:**

> Only contains plot from 1x01. In the pilot, Liv asks Ravi how long he suspected her being a zombie. He said, "Since Raul Cortez." This is my backstory attempt leading up to Ravi finally asking her if the hot sauce is a zombie thing.

Ravi had suspected Liv was a zombie long before he caught her watching Night of the Living Dead and casually chowing down noodles and Jane Doe’s frontal lobe.

The position for a medical resident at the morgue had been posted for months without a single applicant. He was pleasantly surprised when he paged through her application. He couldn’t help but wonder why someone with her career path and being three months away from being a surgeon would want to work at the morgue? It was a logical next step for him after being canned from the CDC, but for someone with her experience it was unheard of. 

She wasn’t at all what he was expecting when he interviewed her for the position. Pale skin, dark eyes, blindingly bright hair, and also very attractive. He can’t say he has ever seen someone look quite like her before. She was very intelligent with a bad ass, to-the-point kind of attitude and it surprised him how much he liked it. Ultimately, he had hired her for his own selfish reasons. Being one of the best medical residents at the highest rated hospital in Seattle, she was way over qualified to be a medical examiner. Ravi was determined to find out what her story was. 

“So Miss Olivia Moore, I have to ask… with all your accomplishments, why do you want a job at the morgue?” Ravi asked in a hesitant, but curious manner while scrunching his nose up as if morgue was a dirty word.

As if knowing she’d be asked that very same question, she took little time to reply, “Because I have realized that I have changed and that being a surgeon is what my family wants, not what I want. So this is me branching out and using my medical knowledge in a somewhat…different setting.”

He knew he was offering her the job the second she walked into his office, but still had to go through all the boring routine interview questions. “Well that sounds like a good enough reason to me, you start on Monday!” Ravi cheerfully exclaimed as he reached out his hand to shake hers. He couldn’t help but notice how her tiny hand felt like ice in his.

The first couple of weeks working with Liv were pretty uneventful. He showed her the in’s and out’s of working a coroner case and took her to a few scenes when the police called to say they had a body. By the end of her second week, she was opening and closing up bodies all on her own, while Ravi completed the paperwork in his office. 

The first time he ever suspected something was not quite right with his new resident was when he noticed her moods seemed to change every couple of weeks. Of course his first thought didn’t scream supernatural, but his mind went over an array of mental health disorders she could possibly be suffering from. She went two whole weeks obsessively organizing and labeling everything in the lab. It did make him chuckle when he noticed “MICROSCOPE” in perfect block lettering labeled on the front of his microscope one morning.

“Hey Liv, I almost didn’t know what that giant foreign instrument was on the counter! Thank heaven’s it has a label on it!“ He joked as he walked towards his office. Then one day, it completely stopped and he never saw her pick up the label maker again. Although to think of it, she did obsessively start looking up cat figurines on eBay shortly after that. 

Working for the CDC exposed him to a whole new world of disastrous possibilities; man made biological warfare. He had been warning them for months but they just thought he was crazy. He overheard them call him Mulder once when they didn’t think he was in earshot. He first suspected a non human cause for Liv’s personality changes after Raul Cortez. Raul Cortez was the farthest thing from an upstanding citizen there was. He was a gangbanger who was shot to death during a drug deal gone wrong. The police weren’t exactly upset to see him in a body bag. He was shot right through his abdominal aorta and instantly bled to death on the corner of a street in run down area of Seattle. Ravi hadn’t been feeling well the day of the autopsy, so he kindly asked Liv if she would close Mr. Cortez up when she was done so he could head home early.

“Don‘t forget to put him back in the drawer when you’re done! Oh, and don’t forget to file the paperwork. And the lights, make sure you turn them all off, I don‘t want to be blamed for wasting electricity…” He rambled on as if he were a parent leaving their child home alone for the first time. 

“Sure thing, boss!” Liv said with a smile while he threw his bag over his shoulder and walked up the steps to leave. 

A week later when the detective working the case needed Mr. Cortez opened back up, Ravi was dumbfounded that he was missing half a pound of his brain. He couldn’t come up with a logical explanation why a man that started the autopsy with a full brain, would be missing half of it afterwards. That night he planned to do a little investigating on his own. He let Liv finish up the case she was working on and told her she could head out early. He sat down at his desk and took a deep breath as he typed her name into the search engine. He wasn’t entirely prepared for what he saw.

There was Liv’s name along with several others on a list of survivor’s from the Lake Washington Massacre a few months back. Ravi knew all about the Lake Washington massacre. A bunch of college kids trying the new designer drug Utopium. A fight and a fire broke out and the only survivors had to jump ship to have any chance of survival. He happened to be working that night and quickly remembered that many of the victims that night were missing significant brain matter… Just like Raul Cortez currently is.

Jumping out of his chair, he almost tripped over his own feet trying to get to his stack of autopsy files. He started pulling out the files of all the cases Liv completed. One by one he confirmed that none of the victims had any traumatic brain injuries and that their skulls were indeed intact before the autopsy was complete. Out of all the cases Liv completed, only one other body was still in the morgue waiting on the funeral home to pick it up.

He walked out of his office and over to the drawer labeled Cheryl Higgins and pulled open the door. Throwing on his lab jacket and a pair of gloves he began opening back up the cranium of Mrs. Higgins skull. His suspicion was confirmed when he saw that Mrs. Higgins no longer had a brain.

Ravi couldn’t wait to see Liv the next day so he could further work out his theory. He couldn’t remember the last time he was that excited to go to work. Now that he had his suspicions, he started documenting them. He had a notebook locked up in his desk that he wrote everything down in, as well as his voice recorder on his phone. He decided he needed to gather more proof before he could accuse someone of being a brain eating zombie. 

Over the next few weeks, he started to pay attention to her eating habits. Of course she ate, but it was the way she packaged her food that was different. She always had a variety of Tupperware containers with different ingredients. And the hot sauce… He could not for the life of him figure out why she put hot sauce on absolutely everything she ate. Ravi thought he was being sneaky but apparently hovering over her shoulder while she ate was suspicious behavior. “You know, if you’d like me to bring you left over’s, I’d be happy to.” Liv said as she eyed him out of the corner of her eye. Embarrassed that he was caught red handed, he quickly stammered out, “Oh no, I’m good. You um… just always seem to bring the most interesting food to eat at work.”

After that, Ravi tried to be more careful about the way he observed her. There were several coroner cases and he let her finish every autopsy that needed to be done while he always made an excuse to have somewhere to go. If Liv ever suspected anything, she didn’t let on. Each case he let her finish up, he would go back in after hours and personally re-open the bodies. Each and every autopsy Liv performed all had one thing in common; they were all missing their brains. 

Finally feeling confident that he had enough proof, he spent the next couple days mulling over how to bring it up to Liv. “Oh Hey Liv! So I’ve noticed you are taking the brains of all bodies that come in, could it be because you are a zombie?” He said out loud to himself, rolling his eyes.

It worked out perfectly that he ended up having to run back to the morgue one day after he had already told her he would be gone for the rest of the shift. Walking down the stairs, the first thing he noticed was that all the lights were off, but he could see the glow of the television coming out of the office. Walking closer, he could smell the hot sauce before he could even see her. Then his eyes focused and there she was, staring at the TV watching “Night of the Living Dead” of all movies, and shoving her mouth with noodles and most likely, their Jane Doe’s brains.

He flicked on the lights and saw her startled face when she realized she was not alone anymore.

Every rational thought flew out of his mind in that moment, and the only thing he could think to say was, “I have so many questions! First, why the hot sauce? Is that a zombie thing?”


End file.
